Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when an Algerian army helicopter patrolling an area south of the capital, Algiers, opened fire on what soldiers thought was a terrorist encampment. The monks were among the corpses discovered there. When Buchwalter reported that news to his superiors, he said, he was ordered to remain silent to protect French-Algerian relations. "There are a lot of aspects of the official story that just don't stand up, including the fact that several alerts on the Algerian army's responsibility were never followed up," says a French counterterrorism official who confirmed to Time the existence of Buchwalter's testimony after...
...they could be exchanged for captured militants, a notion that perplexed terrorist experts more used to the GIA killing its enemies in well-planned strikes. Puzzlement grew when the GIA issued a second communiqué in May, saying that it had "slit the throats of the seven monks." Some French officials suspect Algerian secret-service officials had actually staged the abduction to further demonize the GIA in European eyes. The follow-up plan to free the monks in a "rescue operation," sources speculate, was ruined when unsuspecting regular-army forces attacked the suspected militants. Algerian leaders have emphatically denied...
News of Buchwalter's testimony has prompted others with knowledge of the case to go public. Former French anti-terrorism magistrate Alain Marsaud noted on July 7 that he, too, had alerted his superiors that an Algerian intelligence official had told him that the army had been responsible for the killings. That warning, Marsaud says, was "intentionally buried." Father Armand Veilleux, who in 1996 was procurator general of the Cistercian order in Rome, says he met stiff resistance from French officials in Algiers when he insisted on seeing the corpses - and was ultimately told only the heads had been recovered...
Similar doubts exist about the official story in the Pakistan bombing case. French counterterrorism officials have been privately airing their skepticism about jihadist responsibility for the 2002 attack for months. In June, word leaked to the press that the investigating magistrates handling the case had all but abandoned the idea that al-Qaeda was behind the bombing. Lawyers representing families of the attack's French victims told reporters they'd received a briefing by Trévidic and fellow judge Yves Jannier in which they were told that Pakistani officials may have organized the strike. This new theory hinges...
Investigators speculate that in 2000, when France applied an international anticorruption convention banning all kickbacks, those Pakistani officials grew angry. French authorities suspect that members of Pakistan's overlapping military, intelligence and political circles then decided to settle their score by symbolically targeting the French submarine engineers tied to the contract, manipulating extremists whom Pakistan has long been accused of supporting to carry out the suicide bombing. Pakistan has denied all the accusations; a spokeswoman for President Ali Zardari calls them "farcical at best." (Read "Mounting Terror in Algeria...